EAs like to focus on the long term and embrace probabilistic achievements. What about pursuing policy reforms that are currently inconsequential, but might have profound effects in some future state of the world? That sort of reform will probably face little resistance from established political players.
I can give an example of something I briefly tried when I was working in Lesotho, a small, poor African country. One of the problems in poor countries is called the “resource curse”. This is the counter-intuitive observation that the discovery of valuable natural resources (think oil) often leads to worse economic outcomes. There are a variety of reasons, but one is that abundant natural resources often cause countries with already-weak institutions to become even more corrupt, as powerful people scramble to get control of the resource wealth, methodically destroying checks and balances as they go.
In Lesotho, non-renewable natural resources—diamonds—currently account for only a small portion of Lesotho’s GDP (around 10%). I introduced the idea of earmarking such natural resource revenues received by the government as “special”, to be used only for infrastructure, education etc projects, instead of effectively just being consumed (for more info on this idea see this article or google “adjusted net savings”). Although this change would not have huge consequences right now, I thought that it might if there were a massive natural resource discovery in Lesotho in the future. Specifically, Lesotho might be able to avoid some of the additional corruption by already having a structure set up to protect the resource revenues from being squandered.
The idea I’m putting forward for a potential EA policy initiative is to pursue a variety of policy changes that seem painless, even inconsequential, to policymakers now, but have a small chance of a big impact in some hypothetical future. The idea is to get the right reforms passed before they become politically contentious. While it can be hard to get policymakers to pay attention to issues seen as small, there are plenty of examples of political capture that could have been mitigated by early action. And this kind of initiative is probably relatively neglected given humanity’s generally short-term focus. I think EAs are uniquely well placed to prioritize it.
EAs like to focus on the long term and embrace probabilistic achievements. What about pursuing policy reforms that are currently inconsequential, but might have profound effects in some future state of the world? That sort of reform will probably face little resistance from established political players.
I can give an example of something I briefly tried when I was working in Lesotho, a small, poor African country. One of the problems in poor countries is called the “resource curse”. This is the counter-intuitive observation that the discovery of valuable natural resources (think oil) often leads to worse economic outcomes. There are a variety of reasons, but one is that abundant natural resources often cause countries with already-weak institutions to become even more corrupt, as powerful people scramble to get control of the resource wealth, methodically destroying checks and balances as they go.
In Lesotho, non-renewable natural resources—diamonds—currently account for only a small portion of Lesotho’s GDP (around 10%). I introduced the idea of earmarking such natural resource revenues received by the government as “special”, to be used only for infrastructure, education etc projects, instead of effectively just being consumed (for more info on this idea see this article or google “adjusted net savings”). Although this change would not have huge consequences right now, I thought that it might if there were a massive natural resource discovery in Lesotho in the future. Specifically, Lesotho might be able to avoid some of the additional corruption by already having a structure set up to protect the resource revenues from being squandered.
The idea I’m putting forward for a potential EA policy initiative is to pursue a variety of policy changes that seem painless, even inconsequential, to policymakers now, but have a small chance of a big impact in some hypothetical future. The idea is to get the right reforms passed before they become politically contentious. While it can be hard to get policymakers to pay attention to issues seen as small, there are plenty of examples of political capture that could have been mitigated by early action. And this kind of initiative is probably relatively neglected given humanity’s generally short-term focus. I think EAs are uniquely well placed to prioritize it.
Check this out: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/147/cause_better_political_systems_and_policy_making/